Personal, political merge in Zimbabwe homecoming

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, June 26, 2007

After a long hiatus, Zimbabwe resurfaced in the international news when photos of badly beaten leaders from the opposition party, the
Movement for Democratic Change
, were broadcast around the world. International leaders swiftly condemned President
Robert Mugabe
, who responded with defiance. Under his 27-year rule, Zimbabwe has deteriorated from one of the richest countries in Africa to the continent's bleakest. Inflation runs at 1,730 percent -- the highest in the world -- and at least 80 percent of the population is unemployed.

Zimbabwe -- not at war, but far from peaceful -- is the kind of continuing crisis newspapers struggle to cover. How to make sense of a country that's been on the verge of implosion for years? In the urgent, vibrant memoir "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa," journalist Peter Godwin, who was born and raised in Zimbabwe, elegantly bears witness to the collapse of his homeland. In the process, he makes a compelling argument for the necessity of journalism that sidesteps the incremental -- the "breaking" -- and bridges the gap between the personal and the political.

Whenever he returns to Zimbabwe, Godwin suffers the dislocation of the outsider. He has lived most of his adult life in England and the United States while his parents remained in Harare, even as the political situation worsened. Told chronologically, the memoir recounts his trips back home to care for his ailing parents, and his fight to understand their stubborn refusal to leave an increasingly untenable home, for which they suffer through such economic deprivation that they are forced to turn their swimming pool into a miniature fish farm. Life under a dictator, as Godwin gently points out, again and again, is both utterly surreal and cruelly real.

Godwin sees the disintegration of Zimbabwe with a subtle eye. Though there are a few lapses into the usual tropes about Africa and colonialism, they scarcely interrupt the engrossing, deeply visual narrative. Godwin marries a love for sensory detail with an astute understanding of the ideological power of a single image or offhand remark. When discussing the situation in Zimbabwe with his sister Georgina in 2002, she says: " 'It might still look just about OK from the outside, but I think we've been white-anted.' " Godwin explains: "White ants devour wood from the inside out. A wooden chair or bed may look fine from the outside, but when you sit on it, it will collapse into a heap of dust." Later, he describes a billboard he sees at Harare Airport pitching Zimbabwe as the "most favorable investment destination on the continent." The number for investors to call is a jumble of illegible letters.

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Godwin also takes on Zimbabwe's complicated racial politics. He enters the trenches of Mugabe's controversial and violent land redistributions, in which white landowners were displaced from their farms -- the source of employment for thousands of people and the majority of Zimbabwe's export income -- so the land could be doled out to the political elite, members of the ruling ZANU-PF party. In one of the book's most surprising moments, Godwin explains how local villagers in Chimani proposed a white farmer as their parliamentary candidate instead of the man the ZANU-PF party machine had selected. When the party refuses to let the white farmer run, the villagers decide to join the opposition party. Though he fears for his life as he campaigns, the farmer says, "It's the first time in my life I've felt really Zimbabwean."

Political repression has fostered an identity that transcends race. As Godwin writes, Mugabe "has created a real racial unity -- not the bogus one portrayed in the beer commercials of the new South Africa, but something more substantial, a hard-won sense of comradeship, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule."

This unity, however, is not seamless. His parents' housekeeper, Mavis, whom they give a generous pension when she retires, later brings "union" men to their house who accuse them of underpaying her and demand money. When Godwin's mother asks her why, she breaks down in tears and confesses that her greedy nieces forced her do it.

Which is the true Zimbabwe? Local villagers joining the opposition or a blackmailing housekeeper? Analysts have long wondered why, if the population is united against Mugabe, nothing has happened to depose him. Godwin's book illustrates the country's thorny reality. When the scramble to scratch out an existence is so difficult, the venues for dissent so few, and the fear so strong, opportunities for coming together also serve as opportunities for splitting apart.

Godwin fulfills the memoir's mandate to dramatize the intimacy of personal struggles against a larger political backdrop. But he also implicitly argues, with great skill, that it is impossible to draw a distinction between the two. That an idiosyncratic, brutal and fickle individual has wrought the collapse of an entire nation is a warning, and a reminder, that when we underestimate the personal, in politics or in journalism, we do so at our peril.

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